Buyers and sellers use a variety of techniques to ensure goods and services meet their mutual expectations. However, traditional procurement systems have been proven to be error prone, labor intensive, and costly operations. For example, often times, when a buyer is looking to purchase a batch of articles, a buyer might negotiate terms for the purchase prior to making the purchasing decision. The negotiation allows the buyer and seller to ensure the articles and terms (e.g., price, quantity, delivery conditions, etc.) will meet any specific requirements. As is generally known, it is advantageous to consider many alternative buyers/sellers when negotiating terms. A larger number of buyers and sellers available, for example, to bid on articles of manufacture, usually leads to a more efficient matching of requirements between buyers and sellers (e.g., getting the best deal). Traditional buying and selling mediums, such as auctions, catalog based purchasing, and selling, and the like, do not always facilitate the most efficient matching of requirements. Alternatively, when prior inspection of an article is not possible or practical, the seller may provide the buyer with specifications describing the properties of the articles. The recent ascendancy of electronic commerce provides a means of avoiding, or at least reducing, the problems presented by the use of traditional buying and selling mediums.
In many respects, the Internet and the World Wide Web based network technologies have largely eliminated the most labor intensive and costly portions of the buying and selling type commerce operations (e.g., the use of mass mailings, printed specifications, catalogs, updating preprinted product information, etc.). However, many of the old problems still remain. For example, the fact that a buyer may find a seller from whom to purchase a batch of articles “on-line”, does not change the fact that the buyer might not be aware of a more favorable purchase opportunity from a different seller prior to making the purchasing decision. Even when negotiation and/or inspection of all articles from all possible sellers is not practical, the buyer would find very helpful a comprehensive system for gathering offers from a large, widely distributed number of sellers.
To avoid these problems, a variety of electronic commerce facilitating schemes were developed. One such scheme involved the use of business-to-business buying and selling exchanges implemented on the Internet. The term “electronic commerce” or “e-commerce” originally evolved from remote forms of electronic shopping to mean all aspects of business and market processes enabled by wide area communications networks, namely, the Internet and the World Wide Web based network technologies. E-commerce is a rapidly growing field, and is generally understood to mean doing business on-line or selling and buying products and services through Web (e.g., Internet based) storefronts or through other similar distributed computer networks. In general, electronic commerce is substantially similar to the more traditional catalog based commerce schemes. The business-to-business e-commerce exchanges, or simply “B2B exchanges” have evolved to focus on the specific needs and requirements of buying and selling between businesses.
As the use of B2B exchanges have proliferated, a trend has emerged wherein each major business to business player wanted to implement its own business to business exchange. Each major business to business player implements its own business to business exchange using its own in-house engineering team, or more commonly, out-sources the task of designing and implementing the exchange to a specialized external service provider (e.g., an ASP specializing in the implementation and maintenance of exchanges for companies). This approach has led to a number of inefficiencies. The most prominent of which is the fact that the implementation and maintenance of many separate exchanges leads to unnecessary duplication and redundancy.
Generally, each exchange implemented for each business entity is implemented as a separate “instance.” Hence, multiple exchanges each reside within their own instance, regardless of how related or similar they are, or the business relationship between their respective operators. For example, for companies in similar lines of business, their respective exchanges will have a majority of their components in common. One example would be the exchanges operated by two different automobile manufacturing companies. Their respective exchanges would not be identical, however, the vast majority of their components would be common. The separate instance for each exchange leads to duplication of components and duplication of costs. Additionally, the task of creating an exchange involves a significant amount of work.
Prior art FIG. 1 shows a diagram 100 of a plurality of each commerce sites as implemented in accordance with the prior art. As depicted in FIG. 1, system 100 includes a plurality of e-commerce sites 101-104 running independently (e.g., within their own instance on their own dedicated hardware). The sites 101-104 are coupled to a distributed computer network 150 (e.g., the Internet) and are accessed by a plurality of clients 161-164.
The separate instances per e-commerce site 101-104 leads to an additional problem regarding efficient communication between sites, hereafter referred to as exchanges. The separate exchanges each running within their own instance cannot easily communicate amongst each other. Unfortunately, communication between the various players involved in a business community is a fundamental commerce facilitating process. Communication between multiple exchanges when each exchange is running as its own instance is not easily implemented. One prior art solution for addressing this problem involves the use of new communication technologies for communicating between processes running in separate instances. For example, “XML” is a communication technology being developed to communicate between instances/exchanges over the Internet (e.g., distributed computer network 150). However, XML is a relatively new technology, and is not yet fully developed.
Thus, for example, a supplier looking to sell articles on an operator's exchange needs to duplicate communication for each exchange operating in the line of business (e.g., selling car parts to each of a number of automobile manufacturers). This includes duplicate communication regarding common catalogs, common price lists, common password authentication and/or registration for suppliers to an exchange, pushing catalog content completely to each exchange (e.g., a supplier can sell catalogs of parts to Ford, GM, Chrysler, etc.), and the like. For example, this often involves registering and/or authenticating a supplier's identity at least once for each of the exchanges and going through the communication process of pushing catalog content to each of the exchanges redundantly.
Thus, what is required is a solution that solves the limitations of the prior art. What is required is a solution for implementing multiple exchanges which overcomes the communication problems inherent between the various exchanges. What is required is a solution that eliminates the redundancy and duplicate components involved in implementing multiple exchanges. What is required is a solution that eliminates repetitive communication actions required of buyers/sellers utilizing the exchanges. The present invention provides a novel solution to these requirements.